Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (11 page)

failed modernizing project of postcolonial Muslim regimes ( Burgat and Dow.. ell 1997; Esposito 1992; Gale 1996; Roy 1 994). In this view, the project of restoring orthodox Islamic virtues crucially depends upon an oppositional stance toward what may be loosely defi as a modern secular..liberal ethos-- an ethos whose agents are often understood to be postcolonial Muslim regimes in cahoots with dominant Western powers.

While this interpretation is not entirely wrong and captures an important aspect of Islamist movements, it nonetheless reduces their complexity
to
the trope of
resista
without adequate regard for key questions such as: What

specifi y do the Islamist movements oppose about Western hegemony, post.. coloniality, or a secular..liberal ethos? Toward what end? And, more impor.. tantly, what form of life do these movements enable that are _ not so easily

captured in terms of a relationship of negation to the existing hegemonic or.. der? Furthermore, as I will show in chapter
2,
the relationship between Is .. lamism and liberal secularity is one of proximity and coimbrication rather than of simple opposition or, for that matter, accommodation; it therefore needs to be analyzed in terms of the historically shifting, ambiguous, and un.. predictable encounters that this proximity has generated. This relationship is best tracked, I want to suggest further, through attention to the specifi ity of terms that have attended debates about Islamic virtues (or orthodox Islamic norms) in modern history. As I hope to show in the chapters that follow, these debates are ineluctably tied to emergent forms of subjectivity that secular processes have contingently provoked in their wake. In order to set the stage for such an exploration, let me first spell out what I mean when I insist that we attend to the immanent forms Islamic virtues take within contemporary de.. bates about Islamization and what are the analytical stakes in pursuing such an approach.

MANI FEST NORMS AN D ETH ICAL FO RM ATI ON

Cultural critic
Jeff ry
Minson has argu
ed
p
e
rsuas
i
v
ely
that one
way in
which
the legacy of humanist ethics, particularly in its Kantian formulation, has continued to be important to post..Enlightenment thought is in the relative lack of attention given to the morphology of moral actions, that is, to their precise shape and form (Minson 1993). Minson argues that this legacy is traceable at least as far back as Kant, for whom morality proper was primarily a rational matter that entailed the exercise of the faculty of reason, shorn of the specifi context (of social virtues, habit, character formation, and so on) in which the act unfolded. The Kantian legacy, I would add, becomes particu.. larly important in light of the tradition of Aristotelian ethics it displaces-a tradition in which morality was both realized through, and manifest in, out.. ward behavioral forms.
42
Against this tradition, Kant argued that a moral act could be moral only to the extent that it was not a result of habituated virtue but a product of the critical faculty of reason. The latter requires that one act morally
in spite of
one's inclinations, habits, and disposition.
43
Kant's telescop..

42
The relative decline of the importance accorded to religious rituals in post..Reformation Christianity constitutes another trajectory of this same development. See T. Asad 1993 .

43
Kant is explicit in his objection to morality that is a result of habituated virtues, acquired through the long process of character formation: "When the fi resolve to comply with one's duty has become a habit, it is called
virtue
also in a legal sense, in its
empirical character ( virtus phaenomenon).
Virtue here has the abiding n1axim of
lawful
actions. . . . Virtue, in this sense, is ac.. cordingly acquired
little by little,
and to some it means a long habituation ( in the observance of the

ing of moral action down to the movements of the will stands in contrast to the value ascribed to the particular form a moral act took in the Aristotelian worldview.44 The question of motivation, deliberation, and choice in the Aris.. totelian tradition was important too, of course, but only from the standpoint of actual practices.

One consequence of this Kantian conception of ethics is the relative lack of attention paid to the manifest form ethical practices take, and a general de.. motion of conduct, social demeanor, and etiquettes in our analyses of moral systems. As Minson points out, even scholars like Bourdieu, whose work fo.. cuses on practices of dress, physical bearing, and styles of comportment things that Bourdieu calls "the practical mnemonics" of a culture-consider these practices interesting only insofar as a rational evaluation reveals them to be the signs and symbols of a much deeper and more fundamental reality of social structures and cultural logics (Minson 1993 , 31). I agree with Minson: when Bourdieu considers the variety ofpractices that characterize a particular social group (such as their styles of eating, socializing, and entertainment), he is primarily concern with how these practices embody and symbolize the

doxa
and ethos of the group such that the ideologies the members inhabit

come to be congealed in their social or class
ha
(see, for example, Bour.. dieu 1977, 1 990). One may argue, however, that the signifi of an em.. bodied practice is not exhausted by its ability to function as an index of social and class status or a group's ideological habitus.45 The specifi y of a bodily

law), in virtue of which a human being, through gradual reformation of conduct and consolida� tion of his maxims, passes from a propensity to vice to its opposite. But not the slightest
change of heart
is necessary for this; only a change of mores. . . . However, that a human being should be� come not merely
legally
good, but
morally
good (pleasing to God) i.e. virtuous according to the in�

telligible character [of virtue] (
virtus noumenon)
and thus in need of no other incentive to recog� nize a duty except the representation of duty itself-that, so long as the foundation of the maxims of the human being remains impure, cannot be effected through gradual
reform
but must rather be effected through a
revolution
in the disposition of the human being. . . . And so a 'new man' can come about only through a kind of rebirth, as it were a new creation . . . and a change of heart"

(Kant 1 998, 67-68 ).

44
This does not mean that for Kant morality was purely an individual matter, guided by per. sonal preference; rather, an act was moral only insofar as it was made in accord with a univer� sally valid form of rationality. As Charles Taylor points out, Kant's moral law combines two fea. tures: everyone is obligated to act in accord with reason, and "it is an essential feature of reason that it be valid for everyone, for all rational creatures alike. That is the basis of the first form of Kant's categorical imperative: that
I
should act only according to a maxim which
I
could at the same time will as a universal law. For if
I
am right to will something, then everyone is right to

will it, and it must thus be something that could be willed for everybody" (Taylor 1985b,
323 )
. 45 In
Excitable Speech
(1 997a), Butler praises Bourdieu's work on
habitus
for its sensitivity to how an individual's social and cultural location comes to be embodied in her disposition. She

criticizes him, however, for failing to attend to the potential of the body to resist this system of

practice is also interesting for the kind of relationship it presupposes to the act it constitutes wherein an analysis of the particular form that the body takes might transform our conceptual understanding of the act itself. Furthermore, bodily behavior does not simply stand in a relationship of meaning to self and society, but it also endows the self with certain kinds of capacities that provide the substance from which the world is acted upon.

positive ethics

There is another tradition of ethics, Aristotelian in inspiration, that provides a means of redressing some of the problems discussed above. Michel Foucault's later work draws upon this tradition to formulate what Claire Colebrook aptly calls a "positive conception of ethics" that extends the domain of ethics "be.. yond notions of norms, justifi tion, legitimation, and meaning to include the consideration of the practices, selves, bodies, and desires that determine ( and are codetermined by) ethics" (Colebrook 1998,
50) .
Foucault's conception of positive ethics is Aristotelian in that it conceives of ethics not as an Idea, or as a set of regulatory norms, but as a set of practical activities that are germane to a certain way of life.
46
Ethics in this conception is embedded in a set of spe.. cifi practices ( what Aristotle called "practices of virtue"). It is only from the standpoint of the dispositions formed through these practices that the Kant.. ian question of moral deliberation can be posed. In this view, you ask not what a particular ethical theory means, but what it does.
47
In contrast to other con.. temporary writings on "virtue ethics," Foucault's use of Aristotelian ethics is not geared toward asserting its universal validity, or recuperating its various

elements for solving contemporary moral problems-such as reclaiming the idea of
telos
or a collective notion of the good life (see, for example, Macintyre

signifi and to pose a challenge to its logic. From the standpoint of my argument here, it is interesting to note that while Butler wants to emphasize how the body becomes a site of resis- tance to social inscription, and Bourdieu stresses the constraining aspects of embodied social power, both analyze the body through the binary logic ofsubversion and/or consolidation of social norms. What is elided here are the diff modalities through which the body comes to inhabit or live the regulative power of norms, modalities that cannot be captured within the dualistic logic of resistance and constraint.

1. This should not be taken to mean that Foucault's conception of ethics is anti-- in any
   

   simple sense. For an insightfu discussion of Kant's infl on Foucault's later work on ethics, in particular the conjoining of ethics and freedom, see the chapter entitled "Self Improvement" in Hacking
   2002.
   

2. Colebrook argues that Foucault's account of ancient ethics is "a positive ethics in which ac-
   

   tions are evaluated according to what they do rather than what they mean, 'each having its specifi character or shape"'
   (
   1998, 43
   )
   .
   

   1984; Taylor 1 995 ) .48 Instead, for Foucault, this tradition allows us to think of ethics as always local and particular, pertaining to a specifi set of procedures, techniques, and discourses through which highly specifi
   moral sub.. jects come to be formed.49 In what follows, I will pursue the direction opened up by this approach-not only because I fi it analytically rich but also be.. cause, as I will explain in chapter 4, aspects of the Aristotelian tradition have been infl ntial in shaping the pietistic practices of Islam.
   

   Foucault distinguished ethical practices from "morals," reserving the latter to refer to sets of norms, rules, values, and injunctions. "Ethics," on the other hand, refers to those practices, techniques, and discourses through which a subject transforms herself in order to achieve a particular state of being, hap.. piness, or truth (Foucault 1990, 1997a, 1 997b, 1 997c; Martin, Gutman, and Hutton 1988; see also Davidson 1994, Faubion 2001 , and Rabinow 1 997).50 For Foucault, ethics is a modality of power that "permits individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others, a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being" ( Foucault 1997b, 225 ) in order to transform themselves into the willing subjects of a particular moral discourse. Despite his attention to the individual's eff at constituting herself, the subject of Foucault's analysis is not a voluntaristic, autonomous subject who fashions herself in a protean manner. Rather, the subject is formed within the limits of a historically specifi set of formative practices and moral injunctions that are delimi®e in advance-what Fou.. cault characterizes as "modes of subjectivation." Foucault thus treats subjec.. tivity not as a private space of self..cultivation, but as an effect of a modality of power operationalized through a set of moral codes that summon a subject to constitute herself in accord with its precepts. "Moral subjectivation," in tum, refers to the models available "for setting up and developing relationships with the self, for self..refl ion, self..knowledge, self..examination, for the de.. cipherment of the self by oneself, for the transformations that one seeks to ac.. complish with oneself as object" ( Foucault 1990, 29 ).
   

   

   For Foucault, the relationship between moral codes and modes of subjecti.. vation is not overdetermined, however, in the sense that the subject simply complies with moral codes (or resists them) . Rather, Foucault's framework as.-
   

3. Th neo..Aristotelian tradition of "virtue ethics" generally argues for the reinstatement of the priority of virtue as the central ethical concept over the concept of "the good" or "the right" in contemporary moral thought. On virtue ethics, see Anscombe 1981; Foot 1978; Lovibond 2002.
   

   

4. For a contrasting reading that combines Foucault's work on ethics with the scholarship on virtue ethics, see Lovibond 2002.