Conclusion: The Unchosen and the Politics of Subjectivity

I am already up against a world I never chose when I exercise my agency.

(Judith Butler, “Interview with Judith Butler”)¹

That the pursuit of freedom and vengeance in American movies continues unabated suggests that American individualism remains a compelling mythology underpinned by an exaggerated belief in liberal freedom. Among the more favoured and familiar products of Hollywood are movies focused on heroic characters claiming the freedom to exact murderous revenge. Some of these are among the most celebrated films ever made – including The Godfather, Unforgiven, and Gladiator – while other more recent examples, such the Taken films (1, 2 and 3), are simply popular. In turn, the popularity of a film like Wild,² based on the memoir of Cheryl Strayed, echoes Into the Wild and shows the continuing appeal of cinematic narratives focused on fearless individuals willing to strike out on completely their own in the wilderness. This form of liberal individualism in the American imagination nevertheless remains haunted by the unchosen. For what this myth obscures are the ways in which individuals are always already subjects, seeking independence in a social world inescapably built on dependence and necessarily exercising their free choice in circumstances not of their own choosing.

In his perceptive study of nineteenth-century American society, culture, and government, Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville discerned a peculiarly strong voluntarist strain of individualism. Political theorist Jack Turner credits Tocqueville with having diagnosed American individualism as a “systematized self-delusion,” such that “At the individual’s heart is a will to see the world in a self-congratulatory way, to construe one’s achievements as entirely self-authored, to interpret accidental privileges as just deserts.”³ Other theorists in recent years have detected similar notes of self-congratulation and self-authorship in the aspiration to sovereignty. Such sovereign individualism is at once all too familiar yet at the same time restricted in the public imagination, including some and excluding others. Wild, for instance, is a notable exception to the solitary adventure narrative in that the individualist-adventurer protagonists have most often been white men, whereas Wild brings a white woman into the tradition.

Films participating in an individualistic ideology can effectively reproduce both egoistic aspirations to sovereignty and disavowals of the unchosen conditions, norms, and circumstances that condition action. Into the Wild, for instance, is a vivid and striking example of this kind of disavowal. The prevalence and persistence of such hyper-individualistic tendencies attests to the importance of de-centring discursive practices of individualism and focusing instead on subjectivity and dependence. While American liberal common-sense individualism, as expressed in movies and politics alike, often remains blind to the unchosen relations and forces that make subjectivity and dependence inevitable, this lack of vision can be challenged discursively and cinematically, telling stories and offering modes of perception that assist in acknowledging that subjects are never sovereign but always dependent upon unchosen conditions, relationships, and norms that precede and exceed them.

American individualism tends to sustain the perception that we as individuals are single-handedly responsible for our achievements, but we are not.⁴ We are situated in unchosen relations, contexts, norms, institutions, organizations, and the like. We are reliant on these rather than completely autonomous. The critique of individualistic sovereignty applies to the achievement of identity no less than material achievements. For not only are we not singularly responsible for ourselves and our achievements, we are not even singular. We are multiple, for subjects contain a multiplicity of identities.⁵ As opposed to the idea that each one of us has “one true self,” the language of subjectivity reminds us that subjects have multiple identities. For instance, your neighbour may be a businesswoman as well as a running enthusiast, a daughter, a spouse, or a sports fan. Among the multiple identities are not only those that subjects claim for themselves but also those that are unchosen, those thrust or written upon them by others, by norms, by institutions, and so forth. These are not diametrically opposed to, or separated from, one another but rather they are aspects of the dialectic of subject formation.

While the familiar individualistic lens tends to focus on identity as a matter of agency and choice, a significant aspect of identity derives from the unchosen. Consider identity as having two sides – one personal and the other social or cultural, one chosen and the other unchosen. Identity, then, is not only what you identify as, but also what you are identified as, not only how you see yourself, but how others and how larger society and culture sees you in light of categories that precede and exceed us. Freedom, then, consists not merely in crafting your own personal identity (liberalism’s freely chosen “life plan”), but also in negotiating with the pre-existing, unchosen elements of your social/cultural identity. For instance, in terms of race, sex, gender, nationality, and so on, the meanings associated with those identity categories (e.g. “What does blackness mean?” or “What does it mean to be a man/woman/transperson?”) are constructed not solely by individuals but rather through cultural and political discourses that precede and exceed any single individual. What this social construction of identity categories means for individual subjects is that they must fashion their identity through negotiation with the unchosen. Apprehending this negotiation can help to shift our idea from the free and sovereign individual to the situated subject.

The unchosen includes more than social and cultural identity categories. It also includes ontological conditions, such as vulnerability, precariousness, relationality, and grievability, which are inflected by particular social and political circumstances and institutions. That is, the unchosen entails political ontology as well as identity. It is not just that as subjects we are all always already “given over to others, to norms, to social and political organizations,” but it is also that those very norms and organisations often “have developed historically in order to maximize precariousness for some and minimize precariousness for others.”⁶ It follows from this differential precariousness that, for instance, some losses are grieved publicly while others are not, as not all lives are understood to count in the same way.

One of the most powerful and historically injurious ways in which precariousness has been unevenly distributed is along lines of race. Throughout this book, all of the films, with the important exception of The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, have focused on white Americans, men and women, including Chris McCandless, Jimmy Markum, Dave Boyle, Sean Devine, Wendy, and Ree Dolly. Such a focus serves as a reminder of the whiteness of mainstream Hollywood films, which in turn says much about the presumed whiteness of the American individual and the privileges s/he enjoys. Still, as evidenced in Three Burials, those who are not white are often not afforded the privilege of individuality, are not recognized as subjects but instead must struggle to achieve a measure of recognition that their lives count, that they matter. Whereas grieving Melquiades Estrada publicly and respectfully required difficult and tortuous struggle in that film, grievability is easily and seamlessly accorded to Chris McCandless in Into the Wild. The final scenes of the latter movie are presented with such a reverential tone (and with a final shot that echoes the ascension of his soul) that the audience is practically forced to mourn the white man McCandless. The presumed grievability of a young, white male further illustrates the way in which that film eschews an engagement with the unchosen side of subjectivity.

While a politics of representation is one familiar response to this kind of disequilibrium, a politics of subjectivity, highlighting the ways in which every subject is enabled and constrained (though differentially) by social circumstances and forces, is more fertile. By highlighting the relations (social as well as institutional, cultural, and so forth) within which subjects are constituted, a politics of subjectivity challenges the entrenched, and even unconscious, autonomous individualism that has become normalized.⁷ As a counterpoint to the politics of identity and representation, consider a film that addresses very directly the challenges and struggles of a marginalized subject, a subject who does not count, and moreover, addresses that subject precisely through the lens of subjectivity and grievability. Fruitvale Station ⁸ is a feature film “based on a true story” that calls attention not just to the death of a “young black man,” Oscar Grant, at the hands of the police, but more significantly to his life. Grant was shot while being detained on the Fruitvale Station subway platform in Oakland, California on New Year’s Eve 2009. Though the film was released about a year before the police brutality events and protests associated with the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner in New York City, Fruitvale Station has received renewed attention in light of those events, and has played a part in placing Oscar Grant in the regrettable company of similar others, including Trayvon Martin and Tamir Rice. The deaths of these young men are a terrible indication of the systematic way in which the lives of people of colour are not only not valued in the United States, but are not even regarded as lives. This kind of normative devaluation of whole segments of the population speaks to the very personal costs associated with the structural effects of racist power.

While many Americans celebrate the election of President Barack Obama and anniversaries of the Civil Rights movement as evidence that racism is a thing of the past, the legal, desegregated coexistence of multiple races and cultures in the contemporary United States unfortunately does not attest to an achievement of full equality. One of the obstacles to full equality lies in the public and shared perceptions of whose lives matter, and thus the Twitter hashtag “#blacklivesmattter” has become a rallying cry for those who seek to make black lives not just grievable but valuable. In fact, as Judith Butler reminds us, “Part of the very problem of contemporary political life is that not everyone counts as a subject. Multiculturalism tends to presuppose already constituted communities, already established subjects, when what is at stake are communities not quite recognized as such, subjects who are living, but not yet regarded as ‘lives.’ ”⁹

Fruitvale Station is a film that intervenes in this cultural politics of subjectivity and grievability quite self-consciously. It enlists its audience in the broader, political work of transforming perceptions not just of the category “young black men” but of particular lives, such that these persons can be recognized as full subjects with multiple identities, with a life rather than a single identity marked by a stereotyped caricature. Speaking of Oscar Grant, writer and director Ryan Coogler said, “I wanted the audience to get to know this guy, to get attached so that when the situation that happens to him happens, it’s not just like you read it in the paper, you know what I mean? When you know somebody as a human being, you know that life means something.”¹⁰ Coogler’s statement resonates with the politics of grievability and subjectivity, displaying an understanding of the dialectic of the universal and particular captured in the contrast of two statements “black lives matter” and “all lives matter,”¹¹ insisting on both while acknowledging the work needed to make the former a reality.

The film achieves its goal of making Oscar Grant grievable and making his life count more broadly by presenting Oscar in a very ordinary way throughout a single day as the bearer of multiple identities. Using this “day in the life” narrative structure, Fruitvale follows Oscar throughout the day leading up to his death and shows him in a variety of different relationships, and thus through different identities that constitute his subjectivity: a young black man, yes, but also a boyfriend, a father, a son, an employee, a seller of weed, and a former convict. While none of what the audience sees of Oscar this day preceding his death is especially strange, it is in other ways very strange given the cultural and racist perceptions of young black men in the media and society. The film’s portrayal of an Oscar with multiple identities directly refutes the kind of “schematic racism, anti-black racism [that] figures black people through a certain lens and filter, one that can quite easily construe a black person, or another racial minority, who is walking toward us as someone who is potentially, or actually, threatening, or is considered, in his very being, a threat.”¹²

Fruitvale’s challenge to these racist figurations is apparent from its very first scene. The film opens with actual mobile-phone video footage of Oscar’s shooting, but then flashes back 24 hours to the previous night, where we see Oscar in bed with his girlfriend, Sophina. After a brief argument about Oscar’s infidelity, the two are beginning to move toward “make-up sex,” when they are interrupted with a young girl’s voice saying “Daddy?” and knocking on the door. Oscar first hides a bag of weed in the closet and then answers the door, and the camera cuts to a shot of a sleepy little girl in her pajamas rubbing her eyes. When Oscar asks tenderly, “What’s up?” and she replies, “I can’t sleep,” he scoops her up in his arms, brings her into the room, and gently says, “Wanna sleep in here with Mommy and Daddy?” The shot of the three of them in bed soon after fades to black, followed by a shot overlooking early-morning Oakland and San Francisco. In this first scene of the film, Oscar is already seen to be more than just a stereotype, for while there is reference to infidelity and selling drugs, he is the furthest thing from an absent or violent father. This interplay between the complex reality of Oscar’s subjectivity and the stereotypical perceptions of a “young black man” continues through the rest of the film. The picture thus intervenes in the cultural politics of race by showing Oscar to be a fully human subject whose life matters and who is worthy of grief.

If the unchosen makes life precarious and individual sovereignty impossible, then apprehending the unchosen elicits the need to rethink freedom and refuse vengeance. In many American films – including Into the Wild and Mystic River – characters and narratives refuse to acknowledge the limits of sovereign individualism. Other contemporary feature films – including The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, Wendy and Lucy, Winter’s Bone, and Fruitvale Station – help to bring the unchosen into view, offering dramatic portrayals of the limits of the chosen and the power of the unchosen. The latter group, each in its own way, contributes to the effort to reconsider freedom and refuse revenge by attending to the precarious lives of minorities and marginalized persons – that is, staying with and attending to the subjectivities of women, immigrants, undocumented workers, itinerant labourers, poor and working class persons, and persons struggling with and for their families. As we have seen, these films acknowledge the importance of our dependent relations with others – but they do more than that. They also highlight the particular difficulties that specific subjects encounter as they try to preserve their relations with others: Pete with Melquiades, Melquiades with his home, Wendy with Lucy, Ree with her family and their home, and Oscar with his girlfriend and daughter, among others. These films can help audiences to perceive these protagonists as subjects, in spite of the larger social and political conditions that prevent or obscure such perception. These particular challenges for these particular subjects point, finally, toward a constitutive paradox at the heart of the politics of subjectivity.

Subjectivity is in one sense existential, for it is always already given and universal to the very nature of social beings. Judith Butler’s insights into vulnerability and precariousness illustrate this clearly. In another sense, however, subjectivity names a challenge – indeed, a political problem. In particular, it challenges existing liberal democratic norms that self-evidently proclaim equality while overlooking the historical, social, cultural, economic, and political forces and factors that produce inequality. One key political problem is that subjectivity is denied to specific populations because the distribution of recognition of subjects is not as universal as liberal principles profess but rather uneven and unequal.

The paradox of marginalized subjectivity, then, is that although we are all subjects, subjected to the unchosen, some of us are not socially and culturally recognized or counted as subjects. Even as they are in many ways not counted or considered full subjects by the dominant cultural norms of perception, marginal subjects are daily more aware of their own subjection than are most normalized liberal individuals – those individuals with “a publicly recognized self,”¹³ if you will. The reason is that marginalized and minority subjects are more often aware of confronting and negotiating the unchosen, where the unchosen appears in the form of identity categories that precede and exceed individuals and frame their social appearance.

This unevenness of recognition has been noted by political theorists for many years; it is a cornerstone of critiques of identity politics and the politics of recognition, and points toward a politics of subjectivity. Recall, for instance, an insight mentioned earlier in reference to Three Burials – namely, Patchen Markell’s critique of the politics of recognition, wherein he points toward an “alternative diagnosis of relations of social and political subordination, which sees them not as systematic failures by some to recognize others’ identities, but as ways of patterning and arranging the world that allow some people and groups to enjoy a semblance of sovereign agency at others’ expense.”¹⁴ The emphasis on “ways of patterning and arranging the world” here shifts our attention to the role of institutions and practices in producing subjectivity rather than just presuming a subject’s identity that is unrecognized. A further problem with the politics of recognition highlighted by Markell is that identity is never a fait accompli, but rather an ongoing product of our actions and our relations with others. Similarly, subjectivity is not a given but rather a political achievement – whether presumed, denied, or achieved through struggle.

Films that complicate our common-sense ideas of freedom and vengeance, and their conventional association with individualism and sovereignty, participate in a cultural politics of film and subjectivity. They do important work to elucidate cinematically an alternative to the dominant individualistic view, the normative individualistic ontology. As an alternative, Judith Butler evokes the idea of “a new bodily ontology, one that implies the rethinking of precariousness, vulnerability, injurability, interdependency, exposure, bodily persistence, desire, work, and the claims of language and social belonging,”¹⁵ The intimate and personal potential of film is well suited to conveying such an ontology. The cultural politics of subjectivity finds a powerful ally in movies that effectively convey the ways in which we are bodies that are always already given over to relations with others and acting in conditions not of our own choosing.