Category: butler

abjection

Indeed, it is part of Butler’s political project to seek out the limits of discursive intelligibility in Bodies, so that, as in Gender Trouble, she can draw attention to those identities and bodies that currently ‘matter’ and those that don’t. Again, as in Gender Trouble, Butler will assert that sexed identities are taken on through the violent rejection and exclusion (or ‘foreclosure’) of identities that are deemed not to matter, i.e. not to count within a heterosexual matrix which has a vested interest in preserving its own stability and coherence at the expense of ‘other’ identities (Salih 2002:76).

bikelove

Foucault power psyche

To this end she concentrates on Foucault’s neglect to explain how power comes to inhabit the subject’s interiority, rendering him docile. Foucault makes reference to the subject’s interiority in his description of the Panopticon, a prison whose architectural arrangement incorporates such observational efficiency that it allows the prisoner no privacy. But ‘no privacy’ is a misleading description in this instance, because the prisoner[s secret life, his inner dreams and desires, are not so much thwarted by his imprisonment as they are constituted and affirmed. In other words, his personal interiority is so effectively inculcated with disciplinary expectation that he is the psychic instrument of his own compliance — ‘he becomes the principle of his own subjection’ (Foucault 1982, 203). Foucault eschews psychological explanations of this process and elides its actual operation by focusing on the totality of its outcome, using the word ‘soul’ to evoke power’s effectiveness in seizing the very core of the subject’s being.

Butler believes that a psychoanalytic elaboration of subject formation represents a much les totalizing and deterministic view of the subject because it demarcates the normative demands of the Symbolic order from the deregularizing eccentricity of the individual’s psyche, or unconscious. In other words, because the unconscious exceeds power’s normative conventions its operations are inherently resistant to power’s demands. Thus, instead of Foucault’s rather disheartening suggestion that the interiority of the body is the unilateral effect of disciplinary power, Butler will argue that the psyche’s internal dissonance and resistance represents a space whose transvaluations might help us conceive ‘a radically conditioned form of agency’ (Butler Psychic Life of P 1997, 15) (Kirby 2006: 116)

The body is not a site on which a construction takes place; it is a destruction on the occasion of which a subject is formed. The formation of this subject is at once the framing, subordination, and regulation of the body, and the mode in which that destruction is preserved (in the sense of sustained and embalmed) in normalization (Butler, Psychic Life of P. 92, cited in Kirby 118).

If the soul is the normalizing ideal through which the subject assumes coherence as an embodied subject, in a body whose identity is specularized and discursively regularized into social legibility (an ideal, an imago), then Butler surmises that the body that enables this process continues to endure in some way, even though it is sublimated within the process of normalization. Happily then, things are not frozen into place, as if normalization is a straightforward process that can be finessed once and for all.

Sublimation must constantly be reinstated and maintained, and this means that the subject is always in the process of coming into being with the shifting valencies of social reinscription (Kirby 119).

As Butler explains it, because the sign’s original intention is perverted and changed when read through a different context, meaning and truth are always provisional, unstable and in need of repair to re-establish their standing, their authority. If this structural stutter in power’s operation is truly intrinsic to subjectivation, then the subject’s mandatory subordination to power is never a process of docile compliance (Kirby 2006, 119).

Butler makes an interesting observation between psychoanalysis and Foucault: the former, the subject (of the Symbolic) is differentiated from the psyche (the interiority of the individual that exceeds social regulation), and in the latter the subject, or soul, emerges from a body that enables subjectivation while somehow preceding and exceeding its injunctions. Butler muses that perhaps the Foucaultian body and the psychoanalytic psyche have interchangeable functions, but how might this blurring of terms prove suggestive for a more radical appreciation of identity and agency?

If power is haunted by the ghostly residue of the body, something it can’t shake off, then the psychic life of power incorporates an internal disjunction that does two things at once: on the one hand, it incites a performative iteration of norms in order to reinstate their authority and, on the other, this very repetition derails the possibility of power’s unilateral efficacy as a purely dominating force. In other words, there will always be a ‘misfit’, some sort of interruption between the demand to conform and the individual’s capacity to faithfully comply. And this rewriting, or rerouting, marks the ambivalence and perversion that is the psychic life of power (Kirby, 2006: 119).

Gender Trouble summary by Salih

Now that you’ve read Gender Trouble, you are fully convinced that gender is the effect rather than a cause of discourse; you are highly suspicious of the category of ‘the subject’, since you know that it is constructed on the basis of the violent exclusion of those ‘Others’ who in some way do not conform to the heterosexual matrix. Although you’re concerned by the intrinsically oppositional nature of identity, you derive some comfort from the possibilities of agency and subversion that open up when Hegelian dialectic (the subject constructed through opposition) is supplemented with a Foucauldian model of power (power as multiple, dispersed, spawning resistance). Fully aware of the difference between performativity and performance, you are now setting your mind to devising ways in which your gender, which you know is a discursively constituted series of acts, could be re-enacted against the grain of the heterosexual matrix. Perhaps you are also thinking about your melancholic gender identity and wondering how you could ‘do’ your gender differently in order to signal the desires you’ve had to reject in order to constitute yourself as a stable subject. It might not be entirely practical for you to turn up at work in drag tomorrow, but you’re sure there must be less dramatic performative acts that will effectively draw attention to gender’s constituted and constructed nature (Salih, 2002. p 73).

performativity

Salih, Sara. Judith Butler. Routledge, 2002. p 62.

Butler has collapsed the sex/gender distinction in order to argue that there is no sex that is not always already gender. All bodies are gendered from the beginning of their social existence (and there is no existence that is not social), which means that there is no ‘natural body’ that pre-exists its cultural inscription. This seems to point towards the conclusion that gender is not something one is, it is something one does, an act, or more precisely, a sequence of acts, a verb rather than a noun, a ‘doing’ rather than a ‘being’ (GT: 25).

Melancholia part 1 of 2

Salih, Sara. Judith Butler. Routledge, 2002. p 53

In ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ Freud distinguishes between mourning, which is the reaction to a real loss, usually the death of a loved one, and melancholia. Since the melancholic does not always know what he or she has lost and is in fact sometimes unaware of having ‘lost’ anything at all, Freud regards it as a pathological condition resembling depression. He argues that, instead of ‘getting over’ and accepting the loss, the melancholic response is to take the lost object into the ego by identifying with it.

Identification is a concept that is central to Freud’s theories of the structuring of the mind into ego, superego and id and, as you might expect, denotes the process and effects of identifying with others, often as a response to loss.

Introjection is the process whereby the subject takes objects from the outside world into itself and preserves them in the ego, and is closely related to identification. In fact, identification takes place through introjection as an object is metaphorically ‘installed’ in the ego, and Butler will argue that introjection is not the only way in which identification takes place.

In The Ego and the Id Freud no longer regards melancholia as a pathology or mental illness, but he now describes all ego formation as a melancholic structure. Freud claims that in the process of ego-formation a child’s primary object-cathexes are transformed into an identification, a formulation that is not as complicated as it might sound once you have deciphered the Freudian terminology. Initially the infant desires one or other of its parents (these are its primary object-cathexes), but the taboo against incest means that these desires have to be given up. Like the melancholic who takes the lost object into heror himself and thereby preserves it, the ego introjects the lost object (the desired parent) and preserves it as an identification. ‘[A]n object which was lost has been set up again inside the ego – that is . . . an object-cathexis has been replaced by an identification’, Freud writes (1923: 367). The ego is therefore a repository of all the desires it has had to give up, or as Freud puts it, ‘the character of the ego is a precipitate of abandoned object-cathexes and . . . it contains the history of those object-choices’ (1923: 368).

Salih, Sara. Judith Butler.
Florence, KY, USA: Routledge, 2002. p 53.

Mourning: the response to a real loss.

Melancholia: the response to an imagined loss. Object-cathexis: the desire for an object; in this case, one’s mother or father.

Identification: the process by which one comes to identify with someone or something; in this context, the object that has been lost. Identifications take place through introjection or incorporation.

Introjection: the process whereby objects from the outside world are taken into and preserved in the ego.

Incorporation: Dispositions: the process whereby objects are preserved on the surface of the body (Freud does not discuss incorporation in ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ or The Ego and the Id). whether, from birth onwards, you desire members of the same or the opposite sex.

Salih, Sara. Judith Butler.Routledge, 2002. p 54.

If your primary desire is for your mother, you will introject the figure of your mother and establish an identification with her; conversely, if your primary desire is for your father, you will substitute your impermissible object-cathexis for an identification with him. Freud is not sure what determines the primary object-cathexis – i.e. why the infant desires one parent rather than the other – but he gets around this problem by attributing the direction of the infant’s desire to what he calls dispositions.

By ‘disposition’ he appears to mean the infant’s innate desire for a member of the opposite or the same sex, but Freud expresses some hesitation on this subject in his description of the development of the ‘little girl’. Freud writes that, after relinquishing her father as a primary love-object, the girl ‘will bring her masculinity into prominence and identify with her father (that is, with the object that has been lost) instead of with her mother. This will clearly depend on whether the masculinity in her disposition – whatever that may consist in – is strong enough [i.e. to identify with her father]’ (1923: 372). It would seem that object-cathexes are the result of primary dispositions, i.e. whether one is innately ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ to start with, and, as you might expect by now, Butler refutes Freud’s somewhat tentative postulation of innate sexual ‘dispositions’.

Salih, Sara. Judith Butler.
Florence, KY, USA: Routledge, 2002. p 54.

Melancholic Heterosexuality

Now let us look at what Butler does with Freud. Butler is interested in the ‘dispositions’ Freud glosses over somewhat hastily, but, rather than accepting that they are innate, she wants to know how ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ dispositions can be traced to an identification, and where those identifications take place. In fact, Butler asserts that dispositions are the effects of identifications with the parent of the same/ opposite sex rather than the causes of those identifications; in other words, desire does not come first. ‘What are these primary dispositions on which Freud himself apparently founders?’ she asks, noting the ‘hyphenated doubt’ (‘– whatever that may consist in –’) with which he interrupts his assertion (GT: 60). While Freud describes ego formation as a melancholic structure because the infant is forced to give up its desire for its parents in response to the taboo against incest, Butler argues that the taboo against incest is preceded by the taboo against homosexuality (although curiously, she does not specify her source here) (GT: 63). This seems to imply that the child’s primary desire is always for the parent of the same sex – after all, why do you need a taboo if there is nothing to prohibit? – and although Butler argues that the law produces the desire it subsequently prohibits, she is still unspecific as to why one desire is produced and repressed before another. ‘Although Freud does not explicitly argue in its favour, it would appear that the taboo against homosexuality must precede the heterosexual incest taboo’, writes Butler (GT: 64) and, although she reiterates this assertion several times in this section, the qualifiers she introduces here (‘Although Freud’, ‘it would appear’) resemble the ‘hyphenated doubt’ that she notes in Freud’s description of dispositions. All the same, the assertion that the taboo against homosexuality precedes the incest taboo is crucial to Butler’s argument that gender and sex identities are formed in response to prohibition. Rather than regarding gender or sex as innate, Butler asserts that ‘gender identity appears primarily to be the internalization of a prohibition that proves to be formative of identity’ (GT: 63). Since the ‘prohibition’ to which Butler refers is the taboo against homosexuality, it is clear that for Butler all gender identity is founded on a primary, forbidden homosexual cathexis or desire. If melancholia is the response to real or imagined loss, and if heterosexual gender identity is formed on the basis of the primary loss of the same-sexed object of desire, it follows that heterosexual gender identity is melancholic. Butler’s Foucauldian appropriation of Freud’s theories of mourning, melancholia and ego formation and her argument that heterosexuality is founded on primary homosexual desire constitute one of Gender Trouble’s most important achievements and, since the theory of melancholic gender identities and identifications underscores so much of her subsequent work, I will quote Butler at length here by way of summary:

If feminine and masculine dispositions are the result of the effective internalization of [the taboo against homosexuality], and if the melancholic answer to the loss of the same-sexed object is to incorporate and, indeed, to become that object through the construction of the ego-ideal, then gender identity appears primarily to be the internalization of a prohibition that proves to be formative of identity.

Further, this identity is constructed and maintained by the consistent application of this taboo, not only in the stylization of the body in compliance with discrete categories of sex but in the production and ‘disposition’ of sexual desire . . . dispositions are not the primary sexual facts of the psyche, but produced effects of a law imposed by culture and by the complicitous and transvaluating acts of the ego ideal (Judith Butler. Gender Trouble 63-4, cited in Salih, 56).

melancholy heterosexuality

Salih, Sara. Judith Butler. Routledge, 2002. p 56.

MELANCHOLY HETEROSEXUALITY

The case study of the ‘little girl’ could be summarized as follows:

‘little girl’s’ desire for her mother → incest taboo → ‘little girl’s’ melancholia→identification with mother through incorporation → ‘little girl’s’ disavowed homosexual desire → femininity→melancholic heterosexuality

MELANCHOLY GENDER

The loss of a love object results in melancholy and an identification with that object. According to Butler, the taboo against homosexuality precedes the taboo against incest, which means that homosexual desire is prohibited from the outset. Whereas it is possible to grieve the consequences of the incest taboo in a heterosexual culture, the taboo against homosexuality cannot be grieved and so the response to the taboo against homosexuality is melancholia rather than mourning (GT: 69). The melancholic identification with same-sexed parent is incorporated, i.e. preserved on the surface of the body, so that, far from being ‘natural’ or a given, like gender, sex is a process, something one assumes through identification and incorporation. The melancholy heterosexual subject will ‘bear’ her or his forbidden same-sex desire on the surface of the body, so that physical ‘ultra-femininity’ and ‘ultra-masculinity’ denote the subject’s relinquished desire for an object of the same sex. This means that you ‘are’ what you have desired, and that the desires you have been prevented from expressing are symptomatized on the body and in your behaviour. All sexuality and gender identities are melancholic, but Butler points out that, since there is not the same sanction against acknowledging heterosexual desire in a heterosexual culture, homosexual and heterosexual melancholia are not identical (Salih, Sara. 2002. p 58).

Salih, Sara. Judith Butler. Routledge, 2002. p 56.

INCORPORATION

By referring to ‘the stylization of the body’ and ‘the production and “disposition” of sexual desire’ in the section I have just quoted, Butler introduces the idea that sex, as much as gender, is a result of the taboo against homosexuality. So far she has argued that the taboo against homosexuality triggers the melancholic response described by Freud in ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, in other words, an identification with the parent of the same sex. Butler talks of this identification in terms of ‘internalization’, implying that, as in Freud’s descriptions, the lost object is introjected and set up in the ego as an identification . Now, departing from Freud, who does not talk about incorporation in ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ or The Ego and the Id, Butler asks where melancholic identification takes place, and she concludes that identifications are incorporated, i.e. preserved on the surface of the body (GT: 67).

Here Butler follows Abraham and Torok, who argue that, whereas mourning leads to the introjection of the lost object, melancholia results in its incorporation. ‘When we consider gender identity as a melancholic structure, it makes sense to choose “incorporation” as the manner by which that identification is accomplished’, Butler writes; ‘[G]ender identity would be established through a refusal of loss that encrypts itself in the body . . . incorporation literalizes the loss on or in the body and so appears as the facticity of the body, the means by which the body comes to bear “sex” as its literal truth’ (GT: 68). It is not just the ego that is the receptacle for object-cathexes that have had to be abandoned, but the body itself is a sort of ‘tomb’ (note the word ‘encrypts’) in which, however, these lost desires are far from ‘buried’ since they are preserved on the surface of the body and thus constitute one’s sex and gender identities. Butler formulates the ontological equation in the following way: ‘If the heterosexual denial of homosexuality results in melancholia and if melancholia operates through incorporation, then the disavowed homosexual love is preserved through the cultivation of an oppositionally defined gender identity’ (GT: 69). Or, more bluntly put, you are what you have desired (and are no longer permitted to desire). All stable gender identities are ‘melancholic’, founded on a prohibited primary desire that is written on the body and, as Butler asserts, rigid gender boundaries conceal the loss of an original, unacknowledged and unresolved love (GT: 63). It is not just straight people who suffer from melancholy gender (if ‘suffer’ is the right verb: Butler calls melancholy heterosexuality a ‘syndrome’, which does seem to hint that there is something pathological about it (GT: 71)). Butler accepts that ‘a homosexual for whom heterosexual desire is unthinkable’ will maintain his or her heterosexual desire through the melancholic incorporation of that desire, but she points out that, since there is not the same cultural sanction against acknowledging heterosexuality, heterosexual and homosexual melancholia are not really equivalent (GT: 70). Like gender, the body conceals its genealogy and presents itself as a ‘natural fact’ or a given, whereas, by arguing that relinquished desire is ‘encrypted’ on the body, Butler asserts that the body is the effect of desire rather than its cause. The body is an imagined structure which is the consequence or the product of desire: ‘the phantasmatic nature of desire reveals the body not as its ground or cause, but as its occasion and its object’, she writes; ‘The strategy of desire is in part the transfiguration of the desiring body itself’ (GT: 71). The idea that desire ‘transfigures’ the body is complex, but for the purposes of this discussion it is enough to note that Butler is not positing a body that is stable, fixed and ‘merely matter’, but one that is constructed and contoured by discourse and the law. Butler returns to the question of the body in the third chapter of Gender Trouble, ‘Subversive Bodily Acts’, where she considers both sex and gender as ‘enactments’ that operate performatively to establish the appearance of bodily fixity. If both gender and sex are ‘enactments’ rather than givens, then it will be possible to enact them in unexpected, potentially subversive ways. Before she goes on to discuss performativity and parody, Butler considers the subversive potential of the law.

gender

Sara Salih. Judith ButlerRoutledge 2002.

What Butler means is that gender is an act or a sequence of acts that is always and inevitably occurring, since it is impossible to exist as a social agent outside the terms of gender (GT: 5 cited in Salih 47).

Butler argues that sex and gender are discursively constructed and that there is no such position of implied freedom beyond discourse. Culturally constructed sexuality cannot be repudiated, so that the subject is left with the question of how to acknowledge and ‘do’ the construction it is already in (GT: 31). Gender Trouble will describe how genders and sexes are currently ‘done’ within the heterosexual matrix, while elaborating on how it is possible to ‘do’ those constructions differently (Salih, 48).

‘gender is not a noun[but it] proves to be performative, that is, constituting the identity it is purported to be. In this sense, gender is always a doing, though not a doing by a subject who might be said to preexist the deed’ (GT: 25 Salih, 50).

Reading structuralist and psychoanalytic accounts of gender, identity and the law through a Foucauldian lens Butler

  • gives what she calls ‘a discursive account of the cultural production of gender’; in other words, she works from the premise that gender is a discursive construct, something that is produced, and not a ‘natural fact’;
  • and characterizes the law as multiple, proliferating and potentially self-subverting as opposed to the singular, prohibitive and rigidly repressive law posited by other theorists (for example, Lacan) (Salih, Sara. Judith Butler: 51).

‘There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very “expressions” that are said to be its results’ (GT: 25 cited in Salih 63).

‘That the gendered body is performative suggests that it has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality’, she writes (GT: 136; my emphasis).

Once again we return to the notion that there is no doer behind the deed, no volitional agent that knowingly ‘does’ its gender, since the gendered body is inseparable from the acts that constitute it. All the same, in the account of parody and drag that follows this description it does at times sound as though there is an actor or a ‘doer’ behind the deed, and Butler later admits that in Gender Trouble she ‘waffled’ between describing gender in terms of linguistic performativity and characterizing it as straightforward theatre. Her theories are clarified in Bodies That Matter where Butler emphasizes the Derridean and Austinian underpinnings of performativity that are as yet only implicit in Gender Trouble (Salih. 2002. p 65).

Gender does not happen once and for all when we are born, but is a sequence of repeated acts that harden into the appearance of something that’s been there all along. If gender is ‘a regulated process of repetition’ taking place in language, then it will be possible to repeat one’s gender differently, as drag artists do (and you might also recall my wardrobe analogy – the ripped clothes and the sequins representing my attempts to ‘do’ my gender in subversive and unexpected ways). As I argued previously, you cannot go out and acquire a whole new gender wardrobe for yourself, since, as Butler puts it, ‘[t]here is only a taking up of the tools where they lie, where the very “taking up” is enabled by the tool lying there’ (GT: 145). So you have to make do with the ‘tools’, or in my example, the ‘clothes’ that you already have, radically modifying them in ways which will reveal the ‘unnatural’ nature of gender. There are two problems with this formulation: one is that the manner of taking up the tool will be determined as well as enabled by the tool itself – in other words, subversion and agency are conditioned, if not determined, by discourses that cannot be evaded. This leads to the second problem, which is that, if subversion itself is conditioned and constrained by discourse, then how can we tell that it is subversion at all? What is the difference between subversive parody and the sort of ‘ordinary’ parody that Butler claims everyone is unwittingly engaged in anyway. All gender is parodic, but Butler warns that ‘[p]arody by itself is not subversive’ and she poses the important question as to which performances effect the various destabilizations of gender and sex she describes, and where those performances take place (GT: 139). There are some forms of drag that are definitely not subversive, but serve only to reinforce existing heterosexual power structures – in Bodies, Butler cites Dustin Hoffman’s performance in Tootsie as an example of what she calls ‘high het entertainment’ (see Chapter 3, this volume), and we might also add the more recent film Mrs Doubtfire in which Robin Williams gives a cross-dressed performance as a nanny. Neither of these drag performances are subversive, since they serve to reinforce existing distinctions between ‘male’ and ‘female’, ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’, ‘gay’ and ‘straight’.

Butler’s claim on the penultimate page of Gender Trouble that ‘[t]he task is not whether to repeat, but how to repeat, or, indeed to repeat and, through a radical proliferation of gender, to displace the very gender norms that enable the repetition itself’ (GT: 148) presents a similar problem: she has already asserted that to describe identity as an effect is not to imply that identity is ‘fatally determined’ or ‘fully artificial and arbitrary’, and yet at times it sounds as though the subject she describes is in fact trapped within a discourse it has no power to evade or to alter. In which case, ‘how to repeat’ will already be determined in advance, and what looks like agency is merely yet another effect of the law disguised as something different. All the same, this is certainly not a view Butler expresses, and she seems optimistic about the possibilities of denaturalizing, proliferating and unfixing identities in order to reveal the constructed nature of heterosexuality. A proliferation of identities will reveal the ontological possibilities that are currently restricted by foundationalist models of identity (i.e. those theories which assume that identity is simply there and fixed and final). This is not, then, ‘the death of the subject’, or if it is, it is the theoretical death of an old, fixed subject, and the birth of a new, constructed one characterized by subversive possibility and agency. ‘Construction is not opposed to agency; it is the necessary scene of agency’, Butler affirms (GT: 147; see also CF: 15), and this leads her to refute another assumption popular among critics who are hostile to so-called ‘postmodern’ formulations of identity: ‘[t]he deconstruction of identity is not the deconstruction of politics; rather, it establishes as political the very terms through which identity is articulated’ (GT: 148) (Salih.2002. p 67).

Gender Trouble calls the category of the subject into question as Butler engages in a genealogical critique that analyzes the conditions of the subject’s emergence within discourse. Butler deploys psychoanalytic, Foucauldian and feminist theories in her discussions of homosexuality and heterosexuality and their mutual construction within the law. Heterosexual identities are constructed in relation to their abjected homosexual ‘Other’, but melancholic heterosexuals are haunted by the trace of this ‘Other’ which is never finally or fully abjected. This means that identities are by no means as straight, straightforward or singular as they appear and may be subversively worked against the grain in order to reveal the unstable, resignifiable nature of all gender identities. Some of these subversive practices are outlined in Gender Trouble and are analyzed further in her next book, Bodies That Matter (Salih 2002. p 71)

Excitable Speech

Vicki Kirby. JB: Live Theory. 2006. Continuum

Language is not a mere instrument or tool in this account, a technology used to different effects by a sovereign subject who controls it. The complication here is that if we ourselves are an effect of language then the complexity of its ontology resonates with our own constitution (88).

There is a life a discourse that exceeds the subject’s own temporality (92).

In Excitable Speech Butler specifically interrogates the act of hate speech because although great suffering can be attributed to these injurious acts she disputes the juridical model of power which informs campaigns to stop it. … Butler’s point here is that ‘the sovereign conceit’ which installs a causal equivalence between the speaker’s intention to wound, the actual representation of hate and the impact felt by the victim shows little appreciation of the problematic nature of communication. Further to this, this style of analysis inadvertently constitutes the victim of hate speech as a powerless object of the act, a passive recipient of injury whose incapacity renders them totally vulnerable. Lacking agency, the subject’s only hope of protection is that the state will exercise its power to prohibit and police such acts (94).

From Butler’s 1999 interview with Vicki Bell:

I think there are all kinds of reasons to stop a person when they speak such things [racist and homophobic speech]… I think that’s important. But I think a politics that begins and ends with that policing function is a mistake, because for me the question is how is that person, as it were, renewing and reinvigorating racist rituals of speech, and how do we think about those particular rituals and how do we exploit their ritual function in order to undermine it in a more thorough-going way, rather than just stopping it as it’s spoken. What would it mean to restage it, take it, do something else with the ritual so that its revivability as a speech act is really seriously called into question? (Butler and Bell 1999, 166)

… her intention is to destabilize correspondence theories of language and to complicate what is actually meant by this notion of ‘discursive constitution’.

An important consideration for Butler is that the outcome of language is always threatened by incoherence, contingency and ambiguity, for it involves an intricate web of dispersed causality where the presumed integrity of authorship and authority, meaning and intention, are ‘spoken through’ by convention. This means that discursive convention is not a static structure but one which ‘suffer[s] destructuration through being reiterated, repeated, and rearticulated’. With this in mind, Butler asks, ‘[m]ight the speech act of hate speech be understood as less efficacious, more prone to innovation and subversion, if we were to take into account the temporal life of the “structure” it is said to enunciate? (Butler from Excitable, quoted in Kirby 2006, 95)

illocutionary act (performative utterance) language that performs an action as it is said.
“speech acts that in saying do what they say, and do it in the moment of that saying”. The illocutionary speech act is itself the deed that it effects

“I bet” when said to a casino employee, or “I do” when said in a marriage ceremony to a future spouse, respectively constitute the fact of bettting and marrying. The actual practice of language can here be described as truth producing.

… if I am a heterosexual man standing in front of a registrar in a Register Office and I utter the words ‘I do’ in answer to the question, ‘Do you take this woman to be your wife?’, then I am actually performing the action by making the utterance: statements like these are called performative utterances or illocutionary acts. ‘To name the ship is to say (in the appropriate circumstances) the words “I name &c.” When I say, before the registrar or altar &c., “I do”, I am not reporting on a marriage, I am indulging in it’ (Austin 1955: 6) (Salih 2002. p 88).

perlocutionary act (constative utterance) language that describes the world
“speech acts that produce certain effects as their consequence; by saying something, a certain effect follows.” The perlocutionary merely leads to certain effects that are not the same as the speech act itself.

In Bodies That Matter Butler once again draws from these lectures on linguistics, How To Do Things With Words. Austin distinguishes between two types of utterances, those that describe or report on something, and those that, in saying, actually perform what is being said.

Austin calls constative utterances, might be the statement, ‘It’s a sunny day’, or ‘I went shopping’ (Austin also calls these perlocutionary acts); by saying ‘I went shopping’, I am not doing it, I am merely reporting an occurrence.

butler discourse

In sum, then, Butler’s desire to engage the structured movement of differentiation within language does not preclude the existence of an outside language that truly does exceed our perceptions and representations; it’s just that the human condition bars access to it. Accordingly, the perception and representation of this outside, despite its convincing transparency and our sense of its immediate accessibility, will always be a language effect — a cultural production. Butler’s reliance on the overarching term ‘culture’ as the explanatory category that contains this shifting process surely makes the point. In other words, language and culture and mutually implicated — indeed, some would say they are one and the same (68).

No signifier can be radically representative, for every signifier is the site of a perpetual méconnaisance; it produces the expectation of a unity, a full and final recognition that can never be achieved. Paradoxically, the failure of such signifiers … fully to describe the constituency they name is precisely what constitutes these signifiers as sites of phantasmatic investment and discursive rearticulation. It is what opens the signifier to new meanings and new possibilities for political resignification. It is this open-ended and performative function of the signifier that seems to me to be crucial to a radical democratic notion of futurity (Butler in Bodies That Matter, 191. cited in Kirby JB: Live Theory, 73).

If women and other socially abjected subjects are themselves subjected to/through these same significatory transformations then their existence and its significance must be determined within the Symbolic order. Unfortunately, Žižek’s reading of the bar as an absolute prohibition, as if the cut of castration is a definitive fact, reaffirms an ‘outside discourse’ in derelict terms of trauma and castration. Thus, by appropriating Lacan’s notion of the Real to explain this foreclosure, Žižek actually endorses the inevitability, the indisputable necessity, of this violent inheritance of abject subject formation.

In view of this, Butler’s intervention is important because it illustrates that the bar is not an absolute, fixed barrier, but a process of demarcation, an ongoing attempt to bar or draw a line that is never finished. The installation of the bar as an absolute frame achieves the effect of both discovering and repudiating that outside as inherently deficient and naturally base (Kirby, 2006: 73).

By interrogating the foundation, or what is supposedly ‘given’ as the indifferent ground of valuation, and by discovering that it is forged from the same political determinations as other significatory practices, Butler is able to dispense with the foreclosure of the Real entirely (73).

lesbian phallus

Vicki Kirby. JB: Live Theory. Continuum 2006.

But why should libidinal transfer be described in terms of paternity? Through a sliding metonymy of references that presumes the identities it is trying to explain, Freud conflates the generative power of the phallus with the male organ. As we have seen, the phallus is more accurately understood as a productive process of delineation through which entities/body parts emerge into identifiable significance. When this transformative dynamism is arrested and likened to a thing-like property however, man appears to have the phallus, just as woman appears to be this erotic and valued object; a commodity possessed or exchanged between men. This sexualized matrix of oppositional functions and subject positions organizes other divisions, whereby woman becomes a being of passivity to man’s activity, a vacuous instrument for his agency and pleasure, a vulnerable body that requires protection from his invulnerable one, a dumb body that depends on the superiority of his more evolved reasoning capacities. Because the phallus (woman) is figured as an attachment, a tool to be used and manipulated, this heterosexual economy of signification understands man as an incorporated being: He may have a body and certainly desires it, yet he is not himself, body. Despite its cartoon logic, these ‘natural’ associations exert an insidious gravitational pull on the way we conceptualize sexual identity as well as what constitutes a legitimate mode of attachment and exchange/sexual intercourse (53-4).

However Butler finds something disturbing in the way Lacan’s argument seems to have it both ways. He explains the organizational logic of the Symbolic order, those cultural and linguistic structures into with the child is interpellated, as a given system of binary identifications whose positions are determined by a transcendental signifier —the phallus. And yet he also insists (and we are reminded here of Lévi-Strauss and the more general cliams of structuralism) that the Symbolic order exceeds specific cultural or social ascriptions for its is the universal principle of differentiation that motors all languages. For this reason, Lacan will echo Freud by insisting that the phallus should not be confused with the penis, or indeed with any organ or particualr imaginary effect. But what can be done if we accept this thesis? As Butler’s critical energies are focused on the need to contest political inequities, her concern is that Lacan’s ‘explanation’ has the performative consequence of investing the penis (and masculinity) with the symbolic privilege accorded the phallus, and in a way that places the male organ’s political significance beyond question (58).

incest taboo

Vicki Kirby Judith Butler: Live Theory 2006. page 33.

Crucial to Freud’s understanding of how the incest taboo actually works is the need to explain the boy’s repudiation of the mother, his primary love object. The conventional interpretation of the boy’s identification with the father rests on the fear of castration if his rivalry with the father continues. This heteronormative explanation is significantly complicated, however, when Freud concedes that perhaps an incipient bisexuality informs the child’s ambivalence towards the parents.

Butler argues that the boy is actually required to make two choices; an object choice between the mother or the father, and a choice of sexual disposition between masculine or feminine. Of course, the threat of castration becomes more ambiguous in a culture which denigrates and ‘feminizes’ the homosexual as an improper man. Given this, Butler muses in regard to the boy’s rejection of the mother, “do we construe the punishing father as a rival or as an object of desire who forbids himself as such?”

The important point here is that this fraught constellation of sexual dispositions and object choices ‘becomes the founding moment of what Freud calls gender “consolidation”.

opacity to myself

Butler, Judith. Giving an Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham UP, 2005.  Print.

[…] we might consider a certain post-Hegelian reading of the scene of recognition in which precisely my own opacity to myself occasions my capacity to confer a certain kind of recognition on others.  It would be, perhaps, an ethics based on our shared, invariable, and partial blindness about ourselves (41).

The recognition that one is, at every turn, not quite the same as how one presents oneself in the available discourse might imply, in turn, a certain patience with others that would suspend the demand that they be selfsame at every moment.  Suspending the demand for self-identity or, more particularly, for complete coherence seems to me to counter a certain ethical violence, which demands that we manifest and maintain self-identity at all times and require that others do the same (41-2).

The means by which subject constitution occurs is not the same as the narrative form the reconstruction of that constitution attempts to provide (69).

So what is the role of language in constituting the subject? And what different role does it assume when it seeks to recuperate or reconstitute the conditions of its own constitution?

The infant enters the world given over from the start to a language and to a series of signs, broadly construed, that begin to structure an already operative mode of receptivity and demand.  From this primary experience of having been given over from the start, an “I” subsequently emerges.  And the “I,” regardless of its claims to mastery, will never get over having been given over from the start in this way (77).

This mode of relationality, definitionally blind, makes us vulnerable to betrayal and to error. We could wish ourselves to be wholly perspicacious beings.  But that would be to disavow infancy, dependency, relationality, primary impressionability; it would be the wish to eradicate all the active and structuring traces of our psychological formations and to swell in the pretense of being fully knowing self-possessed adults. Indeed, we would be the kind of beings who, by definition, could not be in love, blind and blinded, vulnerable to devastation, subject to enthrallment. If we were to respond to injury by claiming we had a “right” not to be so treated, we would be treating the other’s love as an entitlement rather than a gift.  Being a gift, it carries the insuperable quality of gratuitousness.  It is, in Adorno’s language, a gift given from freedom (102).