Both Fish and Butler make large claims for the sovereignty of human culture over the world of things. Reality is more or less what we make it; material objects are shaped by language; identity is cultural and performative. But cultural determinism cuts both ways. If what we are is culturally scripted, we cannot be the source of our own beliefs, actions, selves. On the contrary, we are the helpless products of determinations that exist in our communities. Fish affirms that we have no freedom of opinion, and that the only alternative views open to us are those of another interpretive community; Butler sees the sole way to influence change as repetition of the cultural script with a difference. Neither has grounds for confidence that things will change much, or that change will be for the better if they do. Stanley Fish argues that if you want to resist, you have to move out and find another more sympathetic community. Judith Butler remains committed to resistance, but can see no adequate way of theorizing the possibility. The radical credentials of cultural constructivism do less than justice, it seems, to the distinctly liberal views of its main proponents. 16
THE REAL OF SEXUAL DIFFERENCE
In The Truman Show (dir. Peter Weir, 1998) Truman himself is the only person who does not know that he is the star of a television serial. Born on the set, Truman supposes that Seahaven, domed, climate-controlled, safe, socially predictable, is all there is. This leaves him at the mercy of a world he does not even know is scripted. But driven by dissatisfaction and desire, in front of a worldwide TV audience represented in the movie by characters whose consecutive responses to the show the camera makes familiar to us, Truman tries to leave town and travel. His efforts to escape are repeatedly frustrated, until he sails as far as the horizon and finds an exit button. The way out is a black rectangle against the plaster sky, the unknown, perhaps the void. The Truman Show juxtaposes the imaginary world of Seahaven with the reality of the audience watching the true man’s struggles to escape the fiction he believes in, and with a third term, a black hole, the real. The real provokes anxiety precisely to the degree that it is not ours to control. Fish brackets the real: it is not his concern. Butler denies its independence, but in doing so, in my view, she impoverishes the politics of gender.
Sexual difference belongs to the real, to the extent that it generates anxiety as difference, while resisting symbolization. Sexual difference cannot be reduced to a distinction between this and that, or to decisive criteria for assigning bodies to one side or another of a single binary axis. Babies are not always born unequivocally male or female. Olympic athletes have to be classified before they can be entered for either men’s or women’s events, but no infallible test has yet been produced to settle the question in marginal cases. Sometimes the evidence of anatomy conflicts with that of hormones or chromosomes. No single indicator seems to be final. Judith Butler’s preferred term is ‘sex’, which points to an essence, and her case is designed to contest the appeal to the biological ‘facts’ of a single binary opposition as the ground of identity. But sexual difference is not an essence, and can hardly constitute a ground.
Difference is a relationship, a space between things, not a thing in itself, not even a fact. And everything we know indicates that it is by no means binary. Lived in history, of course, sexual difference remains a condition for cultural politics to reckon with, though not necessarily as a determining one, and certainly not as natural, where nature is viewed as either prescriptive or inert.
What we make of sexual difference, whether as oppression or diversity, we make in culture. But it doesn’t follow that we make it up, or that we can by means of performatives make away with it. The relation between the subject and the real organism that we also – and inextricably – are renders feminist and queer politics no less imperative: just more difficult, and therefore more demanding.
The sense of an alterity beyond culture, pushing and pulling it out of shape, permits us to escape the cultural determinism and the cycle of repetition. Our relation to the world is capable of change: things can be other than they are. The gap between culture and the real is a cause of dissatisfaction which impels us to want more. If so, current cultural theory confronts the question of the status and the limits of culture itself. On that depends our conception of human beings and their relation not only to the sexual possibilities, but also to the political obligations, of the world we inhabit.
We might even want to say that the absence of the real is the motive for culture – and for the resistance to culture’s regulatory norms. This motive is recurrently figured in Western thought as the darkness of Plato’s cave, St Augustine’s restlessness, fear in Hobbes, Freud’s civilized discontent or Lacan’s unconscious desire, the causes of change. In Judith Butler’s case, what looked at first like the dream of freedom turned out in practice to be a form of determinism. For Fish, culturalism presents a world that looks all too like Truman’s Seahaven: safe, but repetitive. Cultural constructivism reckons without the real, …The sense of an alterity beyond culture, pushing and pulling it out of shape, permits us to escape the cultural determinism and the cycle of repetition. Our relation to the world is capable of change: things can be other than they are.
The gap between culture and the real is a cause of dissatisfaction which impels us to want more. If so, current cultural theory confronts the question of the status and the limits of culture itself. On that depends our conception of human beings and their relation not only to the sexual possibilities, but also to the political obligations, of the world we inhabit. 19