The Self the Walk Undoes: Interviewing Judith Butler
An interview conducted at the threshold between one understanding and another. She has been thinking about this for longer than the question has been asked.
Aufbruch/Matt: Professor Butler. The project I've been building involves a claim that the long walk dissolves the self. That you walk far enough and stop being the person who started. I want to ask you whether that claim holds.
Judith Butler: It is a compelling claim and I want to take it seriously before I complicate it. The idea that subjectivity is not fixed, that the self is undone and remade through practice, through movement through the world, through sustained encounter with something larger than itself. This is not foreign to how I think about personhood. The self is not a stable interior thing that walks through the world unchanged. It is constituted in and through its encounters. So yes, the walk changes you. Every walk changes you. The question is what kind of change and what it means to describe that change as dissolution.
Aufbruch/Matt: When I describe it as dissolution I mean something specific. That the monitoring, narrating self runs out of energy over sufficient distance. That something loosens.
Judith Butler: The monitoring, narrating self. Yes. This is the self that performs itself, that is watching its own performance, that is managing its presentation to itself and to the world. What you are describing is a fatigue of that performance. The performance becomes unsustainable over time and distance and what remains when it drops away feels like a more authentic condition. But I want to ask: is what remains after the performance drops authentic selfhood, or is it another mode of the self? A less conscious one, perhaps, but not therefore more real.
Aufbruch/Matt: What's the difference?
Judith Butler: The difference is whether there is a self prior to performance that the dissolution reveals, or whether what the dissolution produces is simply a different performance. Less monitored, more permeable, but still a production of selfhood rather than its absence. The Romantic tradition wants there to be a true self beneath the social self. I am not sure there is. What there may be is a self that is less defended, which feels different but is not the same as being less constructed.
Aufbruch/Matt: Does that distinction change the value of the experience?
Judith Butler: Not necessarily. A less defended self is genuinely different from a more defended one. The permeability you describe, being open to the music, to the city, to unexpected intersections of meaning, this is a real condition with real value. I am not trying to deflate the experience. I am trying to be precise about what it is. If the walk produces a self that is more capable of genuine encounter, more open to being affected by what it moves through, that is meaningful regardless of whether it is authentic in the deeper sense.
Aufbruch/Matt: The music is doing something specific in this. Wagner is designed to be overwhelming. Adorno would say it eliminates critical distance.
Judith Butler: Adorno is right that Wagner's totalizing aesthetic is not innocent. But I think there is something he misses, which is that the overwhelmed self is not simply a passive self. Being moved by music, being genuinely affected. This is not the same as being administered. Affect is a form of knowledge. The body that responds to the Tristan Prelude with something it cannot fully name knows something that the analyzing mind does not. The question is whether the project allows that embodied knowledge to persist and be examined or whether it aestheticizes it into something safely beautiful.
Aufbruch/Matt: The project produces language around the experience. Essays, vocabulary, reflection.
Judith Butler: Good. Language is how affect becomes available to thought. Without language the experience remains private and unshareable, which is its own kind of loss. But the language has to be adequate to the experience and not merely a domestication of it. The essay that rounds off the difficult edges, that makes the walk into a story with an arc and a lesson. This can be a betrayal of what the walk actually was. The best writing about embodied experience maintains something of the experience's resistance to full articulation.
Aufbruch/Matt: I've been using German words as a way into that. Words like Sehnsucht, Auflösung, Hingabe. Words that don't translate.
Judith Butler: This is interesting because the untranslatable word is itself a site of resistance to domestication. The word that won't go quietly into your native language maintains a foreignness that keeps the concept from becoming too familiar. Auflösung, dissolution, in German carries a chemical sense, a sense of something being dissolved in a medium, changed by the medium while changing it. That is richer than the English word. Keeping the German keeps the richness. It also keeps a productive difficulty, a reminder that you are moving through a conceptual landscape that is not fully yours, that has its own contours that preexist your encounter with it.
Aufbruch/Matt: The project is also about immigrant experience. Being English in New York for twenty years. Never quite inside the language.
Judith Butler: That is a very specific kind of subject position and it shapes everything about what the project can know and what it cannot. The immigrant self is already a self that knows its own constructedness. You arrived somewhere and had to rebuild a self out of different materials than the ones you were formed by. That is a kind of forced denaturalization of identity that many people never experience. It may be why the walk's dissolution feels meaningful rather than threatening. You already know the self is not fixed. The walk confirms what immigration taught you.
Aufbruch/Matt: That's a connection I hadn't made directly.
Judith Butler: The project is about that connection, even if it hasn't fully named it yet. The year of walking and listening and becoming is a formalization of something that began when you moved to New York. A practice built out of an already-practiced dispossession. The operas are a method for making that dispossession legible. Not overcoming it. Inhabiting it more deliberately.
Aufbruch/Matt: And the self that emerges from that inhabiting?
Judith Butler: Is not a completed self. Is not a recovered self. Is a self that has learned to be more comfortable with its own incompleteness. With the fact that identity is not a destination you arrive at but a practice you keep performing, and that the performance can be done more or less honestly, more or less openly, more or less in contact with what is actually happening in the world you are moving through. The walk teaches that. Not by dissolving the self but by showing the self its own permeability. Which is perhaps the same thing, described more carefully.
Aufbruch/Matt: One last question. The project ends in December. What kind of self arrives at the end?
Judith Butler: One that has been walked into a different relationship with its own boundaries. Not a self without boundaries, that is not possible and not desirable. But a self whose boundaries are less defended, more consciously held, more aware of how they were formed and therefore more capable of choosing which ones to maintain. That is not dissolution. That is something more durable. A self that knows it is a practice and has learned to practice it better.
She pauses. It is the pause of someone who has said something she will continue to think about, not someone who has finished thinking. The threshold the interview was conducted on is still a threshold. Neither side is fully inhabited. That, she would say, is exactly right.
