The grammar that governs the narration of subject formation presumes that the grammatical place for the subject has already been established. In an important sense, then, the grammar that the narrative requires results from the narrative itself.
Category: butler
Butler on Althusser
JB reads Althussers ISA article, which poses a police officer “hailing” a person on the street with a “hey you!”. Why do we turn around? What do we recognize in that call? JB comments as follows:
Is this founding submission a kind of yielding prior to any question of psychological motivation? How are we to understand the psychic disposition at work at the moment in which the pedestrian responds to the law? What conditions and informs the response? Why would the person on the street respond to “Hey you there!” by turning around? (Psychic Life of Power 1997: 112)
JB continues on page 118:
To become a “subject” is thus to have been presumed guilty, then tried and declared innocent. Because this declaration is not a single act but a status incesantly reproduced, to become a “subject” is to be continuously in the process of acquiting oneself of the accusation of guilt. It is to have become an emblem of lawfulness, a citizen in good standing, but one for whom that status is tenuous, indeed, one who has known — somehow, somewhere — what it is not to have that standing and hence to have been cast out as guilty. Yet because this guilt conditions the subject, it constitutes the prehistory of the subjection to the law by which the subject is produced.
Here one might usefully conjecture that the reason there are so few references to “bad subjects” in Althusser is that the term tends toward the oxymoronic. To be “bad” is not yet to be a subject, not yet to have acquitted oneself of the allegation of guilt.
Incest taboo reconfiguration
JB’s Gender Trouble 1990. page 72. JB states:
Can the prohibition against incest that proscribes and sanctions hierarchical and binary gendered positions be reconceived as a productive power that inadvertently generates several cultural configurations of gender? Is the incest taboo subject to the critique of the repressive hypothesis that Foucault provides?
melancholic heterosexuality
JB’s Gender Trouble page 71. JB states:
disavowed homosexuality at the base of melancholic heterosexuality reemerges as the self-evident anatomical facticity of sex, where “sex” designates the blurred unity of anatomy, “natural identity,” and “natural desire.” The loss is denied and incorporated, and the genealogy of that transmutation fully forgotten and repressed. The sexed surface of the body thus emerges as the necessary sign of a natural(ized) identity and desire. The loss of homosexuality is refused and the love sustained or encrypted in the parts of the body itself, literalized in the ostensible anatomical facticity of sex.
Here we see the general strategy of literalization as a form of forgetfulness, which, in the case of a literalized sexual anatomy, “forgets” the imaginary and, with it, an imaginable homosexuality.
In the case of the melancholic heterosexual male, he never loved another man, he is a man, and he can seek recourse to the empirical facts that will prove it. But the literalization of anatomy not only proves nothing, but is a literalizing restriction of pleasure in the very organ that is championed as the sign of masculine identity. The love of the father is stored in the penis, safeguarded through an impervious denial, and the desire which now centers on that penis has that continual denial as its structure and its task. Indeed, the woman-as-object must be the sign that he not only never felt homosexual desire, but never felt the grief over its loss. Indeed, the woman-as-sign must effectively displace and conceal that preheterosexual history in favor of one that consecrates a seamless heterosexuality.
sex/gender distinction
On page 7 of Gender Trouble 1990.
If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called “sex” is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all.
It would make no sense, then, to define gender as the cultural interpretation of sex, if sex itself is a gendered category. Gender ought not to be conceived merely as the cultural inscription of meaning on a pregiven sex (a juridical conception); gender must also designate the very apparatus of production whereby the sexes themselves are established. As a result, gender is not to culture as sex is to nature; gender is also the discursive/cultural means by which “sexed nature” or “a natural sex” is produced and established as “prediscursive,” prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture acts. … At this juncture it is already clear that one way the internal stability and binary frame for sex is effectively secured is by casting the duality of sex in a prediscursive domain.
This production of sex as the prediscursive ought to be understood as the effect of the apparatus of cultural construction designated by gender. How, then, does gender need to be reformulated to encompass the power relations that produce the effect of a prediscursive sex and so conceal that very operation of discursive production?
Butler’s definition of heterosexual matrix
Here is JB from footnote #6 page 151, Gender Trouble 1990. Routledge
I use the term heterosexual matrix throughout the text to designate that grid of cultural intelligibility through which bodies, genders, and desires are naturalized. I am drawing from Monique Wittig’s notion of the “heterosexual contract” and, to a lesser extent, on Adrienne Rich’s notion of “compulsory heterosexuality” to characterize a hegemonic discursive/epistemic model of gender intelligibility that assumes that for bodies to cohere and make sense there must be a stable sex expressed through a stable gender (masculine expresses male, feminine expresses female) that is oppositionally and hierarchically defined through the compulsory practice of heterosexuality.
Wittig
JB’s section on Wittig in Gender Trouble 1990. page 121
As in Lacan, the idealization of heterosexuality appears even within Wittig’s own formulation to exercise a control over the bodies of practicing heterosexuals that is finally impossible, indeed, that is bound to falter on its own impossibility. Wittig appears to believe that only the radical departure from heterosexual contexts — namely becoming lesbian or gay — can bring about the downfall of this heterosexual regime. But this political consequence follows only if one understands all “participation” in heterosexuality to be a repetition and consolidation of heterosexual oppression. The possibilities of resignifying heterosexuality itself are refused precisely because heterosexuality is understood as a total system that requires a thoroughgoing displacement. The political options that follow from such a totalizing view of heterosexist power are (a) radical conformity or (b) radical revolution.
JB continues …
My own conviction [JB’s] is that the radical disjunction posited by Wittig between heterosexuality and homosexuality is simply not true, that there are structures of psychic homosexuality within heterosexual relations, and structures of psychic heterosexuality within gay and lesbian sexuality and relationships. Further, there are other power/discourse centres that construct and structure both gay and straight sexuality; heterosexuality is not the only compulsory display of power that informs sexuality. The ideal of a coherent heterosexuality that Wittig describes as the norm and standard of the heterosexual contract is an impossible ideal, a “fetish,” as she herself points out. A psychoanalytic elaboration might contend that this impossibility is exposed in virtue of the complexity and resistance of an unconscious sexuality that is not always already heterosexual. In this sense, heterosexuality offers normative sexual positions that are intrinsically impossible to embody, and the persistent failure to identify fully and without incoherence with these positions reveals heterosexuality itself not only as a compulsory law, but as an inevitable comedy. Indeed, I would offer this insight into heterosexuality as both a compulsory system and an intrinsic comedy, a constant parody of itself, as an alternative gay/lesbian perspective.
Butler channelling Foucault
Here’s more JB from Gender Trouble 1990. Routledge page 93.
I want to suggest, however, that any theory that asserts that signification is predicated upon the denial or repression of a female principle ought to consider whether that femaleness is really external to the cultural norms by which it is repressed. In other words, on my reading, the repression of the feminine does not require that the agency of repression and the object of repression be ontologically distinct. Indeed, repression may be understood to produce the object that it comes to deny. That production may well be an elaboration of the agency of repression itself. As Foucault makes clear, the culturally contradictory enterprise of the mechanism of repression is prohibitive and generative at once and makes the problematic of “liberation” especially acute. The female body that is freed from the shackles of the paternal law may well prove to be yet another incarnation of that law, posing as subversive but operating in the service of that law’s self-amplification and proliferation. In order to avoid the emancipation of the oppressor in the name of the oppressed, it is necessary to take into account the full complexity and subtlety of the law and to cure ourselves of the illusion of a true body beyond the law. If subversion is possible, it will be a subversion from within the terms of the law, through the possibilities that emerge when the law turns against itself and spawns unexpected permutations of itself. The culturally constructed body will then be liberated, neither to its “natural” past, nor to its original pleasures, but to an open future of cultural possibilities.
Butler whoa
From JB’s Gender Trouble. 1990. page 64.
The young boy and young girl who enter into the Oedipal drama with incestuous heterosexual aims have already been subjected to prohibitions which “dispose” them in distinct sexual directions. Hence, the dispositions that Freud assumes to be primary or constitutive facts of sexual life are effects of a law which, internalized, produces and regulates discrete gender identity and heterosexuality.
– Far from foundational, these dispositions are the result of a process whose aim is to disguise its own genealogy.
– In other words, “dispositions” are traces of a history of enforced sexual prohibitions which is untold and which the prohibitions seek to render untellable.
The narrative account of gender acquisition that begins with the postulation of dispositions effectively forecloses the narrative point of departure which would expose the narrative as a self-amplifying tactic of the prohibition itself.
In the psychoanalytic narrative, the dispositions are trained, fixed, and consolidated by a prohibition which later and in the name of culture arrives to quell the disturbance created by an unrestrained homosexual cathexis.
Told from the point of view which takes the prohibitive law to be the founding moment of the narrative, the law both produces sexuality in the form of “dispositions” and appears disingenuously at a later point in time to transform these ostensibly “natural” dispositions into culturally acceptable structures of exogamic kinship.
In order to conceal the genealogy of the law as productive of the very phenomenon it later claims only to channel or repress, the law performs a third function: Instating itself as the principle of logical continuity in a narrative of causal relations which takes psychic facts as its point of departure, this configuration of the law forecloses the possibility of a more radical genealogy into the cultural origins of sexuality and power relations (64-65).
take on Butler
- Butler is no Lacanian, she argues the Symbolic, the Paternal law is a ruse, is just power in a Foucaultian way, that is, the difference between the Lacanian Real and Symbolic is an effect of a discourse of power
- There is a hetersexual matrix literally like the matrix in the movie of the same name. This structures sexuality, and in particular the Lacanian emphasis on the differentiation of sex into male/female as being/having, is a primary example of a construction that is meant to follow a hetersexual normativity.
- Gender melancholia and the Lesbian Phallus are her two signature moves that sum up her radical reinterpretation of gender and sexuality that is critical of psychoanalysis, but is also aware of the shortcomings of Foucault’s premature dismissal of Freud.
To be the Phallus
Woman is the phallus
To be the Phallus is to “embody” the Phallus as the place to which it penetrates, but also to signify the promise of a return to the preindividuated jouissance that characterizes the undifferentiated relation to the mother (note 13: 159).
On page 45, JB states:
Women are said to “be” the Phallus in the sense that they maintain the power to reflect or represent the “reality” of the self-grounding postures of the masculine subject, a power which, if withdrawn would break up the foundational illusions of the masculine subject position. In order to “be” the Phallus, the reflector and guarantor of an apparent masculine subject position, women must become, must “be” (in the sense of “posture as if they were”) precisely what men are not and, in their very lack, establish the essential function of men. Hence, “being” the Phallus is always a “being for” a masculine subject who seeks to reconfirm and augment his identity through the recognition of that “being for”. … The division and exchange between this “being” and “having” the Phallus is established by the Symbolic, the paternal law.
nature culture
As feminism has sought to become integrally related to sruggles against racial and colonialist oppression, it has become increasingly important to resist the colonizing epistemological strategy that would subordinate different configurations of domination under the rubric of a transcultural notion of patriarchy (35).
Butler, J. Gender Trouble. 1990, Routledge