Tuhkanen, Mikko. “Performativity and Becoming.” Cultural Critique. 72, Spring (2009): 1-35.
Footnote 26: On Lacan’s divergence from structuralism, see also Zupancic, Ethics, 29–30. While Butler tends to give undue prominence to the influence of Lévi-Strauss’s structuralist anthropology on Lacan (she repeats this in her latest work: see Undoing Gender, 45), her emphasis on the imaginary in Antigone’s Claim appears to stem from her Althusserian reading of Lacan in The Psychic Life of Power. There, too, she refers to “the unspeakable, the unsignifiable” of the symbolic order in Lacan (94), but, rather than naming this limit as the real, she, as in Antigone’s Claim, moves on to consider the imaginary. Identifying the Althusserian interpellation with Lacan’s subject formation (95), she locates the only possibility for resistance in the psychoanalytic subject’s imaginary misrecognition of the name with which the law hails her. With an imprecision that also characterizes her synthesis of the earlier and later Lacan, she writes: “For the Lacanian, then, the imaginary signifies the impossibility of the discursive—that is, symbolic—constitution of identity” (96–97; emphasis added). In this Althusserian reading of Lacan, “[t]he imaginary thwarts the efficacy of the symbolic law but cannot turn back upon the law, demanding or effecting its reformulation. In this sense, psychic resistance thwarts the law in its effects, but cannot redirect the law or its effects. Resistance is thus located in a domain that is virtually powerless to alter the law that it opposes” (98; see also 89). Here again, as in Subjects of Desire, Butler moves from the dead end she finds in Lacan to Foucault as a more productive theorist of resistance: “where Lacan restricts the notion of social power to the symbolic domain and delegates resistance to the imaginary, Foucault recasts the symbolic as relations of power and understands resistance as an effect of power” (98–99). Shepherdson complicates this reading of Lacan’s and Foucault’s differences in “History and the Real.”
page 19: The political thrust of Butler’s theory is, then, to reevaluate abjected bodies, to shape a symbolic future that would render them culturally recognized and intelligible. I think we can find a description of this Hegelian mechanism in Deleuze’s work: that of the realization of the possible. For Deleuze, who follows here Henri Bergson,
the realization of the possible refers to a materialization of as-yet nonexistent forms of life. Even if these forms do not, in Butler’s terms, “matter,” they are nevertheless prefigured as possible substitutes to, or deviations from, current forms of reality. Possibilities, then, are like a gallery of alternatives from which future reality is selected. Some possibilities are never realized, and here politics comes into existence, in the struggle over making certain possibilities available or refusing the legitimate reality of others.
For Butler, the process that grants this reality is that of recognition. Given her examples of the fag and the dyke as unrecognized, illegitimate bodies, her futurity opens as the horizon of the possible realization of alternatives that have been excluded from and by the heterosexual matrix.
page 19: But to identify the specificity and limits of Butler’s notion of becoming, we should note that, taking his cue from Bergson, Deleuze contrasts this realization of the possible (which I suggest characterizes the politics of performativity) to what he calls the actualization of the virtual. In seeing the future as so many possibilities, we imagine an emergence in which the possible, as “a phantom awaiting its hour” (Bergson, 101), is fleshed out in the process of its realization, its cominginto-being. An already existing form or ideal is given materiality; for Butler, for example, abject but nevertheless existing bodies begin to matter through the legitimizing processes of recognition. Clearly, the importance of politics that seeks to enable the full realization of lives and bodies is not to be dismissed. But quite another thing is to allow the monopolization of our understanding of futurity by this process of realization qua recognition. For Bergson, the error in thinking becoming as the realization of possibilities is that this process can imagine the future only in terms of that which has already come to be. Realization operates through a temporal loop where we retroactively posit in the past the possibilities that “will have been” realized: “the possible is only the real with the addition of an act of mind which throws its image back into the past, once it has been enacted” (100). The possible is realized as a form that, despite its insubstantiality, has been made conceptually available. It is molded according to that which is in existence. Because it is an already imaginable form, we are dealing with “preformism: the real is already preformed in the possible insofar as the real resembles the possible” (Grosz, Nick of Time, 187). According to the model of realization, where out of a plethora of possibilities some pass into existence while others are eliminated, the real resembles and is a limited version of the possible. Consequently, “[r]ealization is a process in which creativity and production have no place” (187); in it, we lose the play of “unforeseeable novelty” that, according to Bergson, only the unfolding of duration allows (Bergson, 91, 93). In thinking “possibles which would precede their own realization,” “the future is outlined in advance” (103).
Unlike the possible, what Deleuze calls the virtual is not a preformed alternative that may be realized, that may come into existence (for example, via the kind of political work that Butler advocates). Rather, it is an undifferentiated realm of potentiality that in no way predicts the actual forms of existence that it produces. As Todd May writes, the virtual can be seen “as the reservoir of difference out of which the speciWc differences that are phenomenologically accessible to us are actualized” (71). Possible futures emerge through the processes of “resemblance and limitation” (Deleuze, Bergsonism, 97): resemblance because that which emerges is a materialization of an already existing possibility; limitation because only a certain number of the possible futures vying for existence can be realized. As opposed to the possible, “the virtual never resembles the real that it actualizes” (Grosz, “Thinking,” 27). It does not have a form, yet as an ontological realm— for Bergson, the realm of nonpsychological, nonindividual memory— it is entirely real. Its actualization takes place through “the rules . . . of difference or divergence and of creation” (Deleuze, Bergsonism, 97). [20]
Deleuze understands actualization as the potential process of radical emergence, of becoming—to borrow Bergson’s term, of creative evolution. Realization, on the other hand, is a double process of unveiling and culling: preexisting forms and models enter existence while others are eliminated (for example, in the political struggle for recognition). According to Bergson and Deleuze, the process of realization does not allow us to think duration, the dimension of becoming that undergirds their metaphysical systems. Only with the virtual can we intuit duration; reversely, it is only durée that enables the unforeseeability of the virtual’s actualization. “Duration,” as Deleuze writes, “is the virtual” (“Bergson’s Conception,” 55). Deleuze turns to Bergson as a source for articulating time as an irreducible dimension of being. For him, Bergsonian metaphysics theorizes devenir in a way that is incompatible with the Werden of Hegelian dialectics, its “false movement” (Difference, 8). Butler, too, clearly acknowledges that, as a theory of becoming, of invention and change, performativity requires and depends on time as an active dimension.
Only in duration can inaccurate repetitions introduce newness into the world.Consequently, performativity does not allow us to think forms of existence that radically diverge from what is currently available to us—forms that, unlike the gender nonconformist beings with which Butler replaces the Lacanian real, are strictly inconceivable from our present perspective. [22]
Grosz writes:
the aim of all radical politics is the production of a future that actively transforms the dynamics of the present, and this may involve precisely an unpredictable leap into virtuality. . . . This leap into the virtual is always a leap into the unexpected, which cannot be directly planned for or anticipated, though it is clear that it can be prepared for. (Nick of Time, 186)
Grosz finds in the virtual an openness that may be useful for thinking about radical change: “perhaps the openendedness of the concept of the virtual may prove central in reinvigorating a politics embracing the future by refusing to tie it to the realization of possibilities . . . and linking it to the unpredictable, uncertain actualization of virtualities” (190). Butler’s argument about the undirectedness and divergence of performatively realized futures seems to echo this call for the unforeseeability of becoming. Yet I have suggested that her Hegelianism cannot tolerate such openness but always, despite her goal of resignifying dialectics, returns to a notion of becoming that makes accessible the possible, not the virtual. For Bergson, a constant interlocutor in Deleuze’s thinking of becoming, duration as radical becoming cannot be thought through the possible:
If this logic [of retrospection] we are accustomed to pushes the reality that springs forth in the present back into the past in the form of a possible, it is precisely because it will not admit that anything does spring up, that something is created and that time is efWcacious. It sees in a new form or quality only a rearrangement of the old—nothing absolutely new.