de Certeau and Butler

While reading Butler, I was reminded of de Certeau's concept of the city existing as combination of "perspective and prospective vision": "to plan a city is both to think the very plurality of the real and to make that way of thinking the plural effective; it is to know how to articulate it and be able to do it" (1345).

Butler discusses discourse as a system which produces the subject through a power of exclusion: "In effect, the law produces and then conceals the notion of 'a subject before law' in order to invoke that discursive formation as a naturalized foundational premise that subsequently legitimates that law's own regulatory hegemony." Similarly, de Certeau's "city" must be create "its own space" by "repressing all the physical, mental, and political pollutions that would compromise it" (1345).

Considering de Certeau in relation to Butler, what might this concept of the "plurality of the real to make that way of thinking the plural effective" imply about the reality of the subject? If the ideals behind a discourse must be created based on possible realities, then what attributes of the subject make those realities conceivable?

I suppose, the answer put forth by Butler, is a subject's identity. Identity, like the concept-city, can formulate and re-formulate itself, depending on dominant attributes at the time,  based on gender, social cast, etc.  Identity is the "universal and anonymous subject" which acts as a space that holds certain attributes while excluding others but has the capacity to include excluded attributes later.

The subject's place of existence centering around his/her conception of self-identity may be the perceptible reality which makes the hegemonic structure of certain discourses possible. Identity is flexible, but this flexibility allows for a greater degree of manipulation by external systems. In her essay Butler postulates, "the controversy over the meaning of construction appears to founder on the conventional philosophical polarity between free will and determinism" (11). Whether identity is governed by free will or social determinism is uncertain, and it is this uncertainty which serves to allow identity to become instrument to the construction of hegemonic discourses.